


In Dreams You Will Lose Your Heartache

by Silberias



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Drug Addict Sherlock, Drug Use, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-23
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2018-01-09 19:07:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1149705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silberias/pseuds/Silberias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock got through his one-man war on the opiate of a normal life with Molly Hooper. It's not her fault she moved on, and it's not her fault that Sherlock indulged in one of his most destructive coping mechanisms. He never meant to let her know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Before getting into the nondescript red Mondeo, Sherlock turned around to wrap his arms tightly around Molly. He held her there for the space of six breaths, deep and even, his mouth hovering just past her ear, his hands nearly reaching back around to touch his own torso she was so small, and he kept his eyes tightly shut. If he’d been John Watson it wouldn’t have taken him this long to realize that Molly was the only one for him—that the life he’d never considered for himself was a life he wanted to live with her.

 _I will have_ it _when I come home._

He told himself this when he had to go a week without eating. _It._ That nebulous idea of the life his parents had—Molly would get on famously with Father, and Mummy would teach him how to be normal for the one he loved. Sometimes, when he would lose hope, he would remind himself that _it_ was everything science considered unknown. Sagan’s _it_ was different, of course, but Sherlock had the rest of his life to study whatever _it_ was that he might have with Molly.

 _I have to come home. She’s waiting, with_ it _._

By the anniversary of his suicide, Sherlock was well obsessed with the fantasy. On the nights he would feel like giving up he retreated into his mind and built up the house. Sometimes he worked on singing lullabies because of course Molly would want children, and he wanted to help her care for them. It wasn’t a white picket fence dream, but it was certainly something normal. Something so entirely his own, something he was fighting for every day, that it started to keep him sane.

_Molly deserves better than me, but if it’s me she wants, well…_

It occurred to him, seeing Molly and reading everything about her, that he should have asked his brother to tell him of her instead of John. He should have, upon realizing that John moved on with his life instead of existing in stasis, questioned his brother further. Sherlock did not use Molly’s fiancée as his excuse to start using again—in this Molly was blameless, just as John was blameless for Mary. It was his own mind’s fault—he had long ago trained his mind to not linger on fantasy, and a future with Molly was now obviously a fantasy.

A fantasy he wanted back—and Sherlock Holmes well knew how to plunge his brain into a haze where it forgot the rules he’d given it so long ago. With the aid of the needle, Sherlock could easily walk the halls of his mind hand in hand with _his_ Molly. Molly who loved him more than anyone else loved him. He would let Molly-engaged-to-Tom live her life with that man, that man who was normal enough to love her as she ought to be—and Sherlock would bow out. He knew his proclivity for addiction, he knew that he’d slipped past his brother’s nets on this mission to relapse.

_‘We’ll name him Sherlock,’ she mumbled with a smile at the infant in her arms._

_‘And call him Stephen, after your father,’ he replied._

Molly wouldn’t ever have to see him like this, she would remember Sherlock who was kind to her and her fiancée and move to the country with her dog and have two children and be normal. His brother or John would eventually find him and put him in rehab and he would get on with his case with Magnussen and get on with his life. For now, he just needed this.

Molly never had to know any of it.


	2. Whatever You Wish For You Keep

 

He texted her that he loved her as he got into the car. Counted the seconds until her reply came back (one hundred and sixteen), and assured her that he was not ‘messing about’. As he counted again, he mulled over one last time if he should tell her outright that he wasn’t coming home or if he should cultivate some hope there for her.

She saw through him all the time, today would be no different, so he decided to own to all of it and texted the details to her before her reply ever came through.

 _I do love you, Molly, and I should have said this to you the moment I got back. I know that I fail you in so many ways, and if I deserved you I would be with you right now._ _Mycroft is sending me away rather than trotting me off to prison because it’s better my body rot along with my brain. John will tell you it isn’t certain I will die, but I myself don’t hold out much hope. SH_

He bit his lip after sending it and quickly composed another and then shut his phone off when it sent. He wasn’t strong enough to say goodbye to John _and_ talk to Molly.

_You were my greatest hope last time around, if you must know. All my love, Sherlock Holmes._

It would hopefully answer all of her questions. It would most definitely make her cry. But it would also bring her closure, and it certainly gave him a grim sense of peace. Molly Hooper was ever a fantasy, and she could be his fantasy in his mind for these last months of life. His mouth twitched into a smirk—perhaps the fantasy she would be waiting for him would serve him soon? It would be nice to prove Mycroft wrong for once in his bloody life.

“Mr. Holmes? It’s for you.”

He’d been so busy preparing for the weeks ahead that the interruption on the plane came as a shock. He kept it hidden, of course, but he really didn’t comprehend anything until he was deposited in front of Molly’s new flat (she’d had to move out after breaking things off with Troy or whatever living hell had been his name). He must have asked to be taken here—or Mycroft was reading his digital correspondence again. Either was a viable option right now.

He hadn’t turned his phone back on yet, not wanting to know whatever horrible things Molly would say.

No—she would never say anything horrible to him, she only ever pointed out the parts where _he_ was horrible. Confessing passionate love before tragic suicide mission via text? He was just _there_ enough to know that that probably wasn’t all that great of a life choice. Sherlock hadn’t had it in himself, however, to call her and hear her hiccupping sobs or his own answering hoarseness.

“Mr. Holmes, did I take you to the wrong address?”

“What? No—no, this one is fine. I’ll just—yes.” He clambered out of the car Mycroft’s people had stuffed him in and straightened his clothes as best he could. _The hard part’s been said, it’s smooth sailing from here out_ , he reassured himself as he climbed the steps and buzzed her door. Her door card read _Hooper_ in his own writing, as he’d had John help her move here. He’d been too weak, still, to do much of the _moving_ but John agreed that Sherlock was well enough to at least supervise.

“Molly, it’s me. Let me in?” It felt like a decade before she replied with a soft “okay,” and the door clicked as it unlocked. He took the stairs slowly, furiously hashing through what he wanted to say to her when he got to her door. The fantasy pressed at the back of his eyes like a migraine. It was a migraine he didn’t want to avert, though, and it hurt more and more whenever he tried to tell himself that he’d put Molly through hell and that if she was smart she would avoid him all together.

She opened the door immediately when he knocked, backing away from it and making her way to the living room. Sherlock closed the door behind himself and put his things on the coatrack. Molly hadn’t said a word so far, and it worried him. Just because she’d be smart to ditch him didn’t mean he wanted her to—but he couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

“Are you going to say anything?” he murmured as he sat in the chair that was opposite where she was on the couch.

“Aren’t you?”

“I thought I already had.” Her laugh then was like her answer to John so many months ago ( _Clean?!)_ , at least in tone. Sherlock had enough self-control not to flinch, but he did look away. Molly Hooper was his moral compass and his self-preservation instinct, and now more than ever before he knew it.

“I wasn’t—I’m _not_ —having you on for a laugh, Molly.”

“I know that,” and it felt like she’d slugged him in the gut with her next words, “but I can’t keep waiting for you to have these grand revelations about how you see me right before you’re about to die. I want to be _with_ you, Sherlock, I don’t want to watch you walk away every time like you didn’t just drop a bomb on my world.”

“I don—“

“You do. You do—every time.”

Sherlock didn’t say anything then, instead he got up and crossed to Molly—his Molly, not Tad’s Molly, not anyone’s Molly really—and knelt in front of her. Her knees were warm under his palms and suddenly he couldn’t bear to look into her eyes—settling instead on the throw pillow she’d sat on, trying to see her secrets through it to keep his brain on task.

“I know how that feels now, Molly,” he said softly, stroking her knee—the patella, finding the places the muscles wove in and around it—and continuing to avoid her eyes. “I came home and I thought that I would find you waiting for me and that…wasn’t what happened. And it was hell learning to live with it. Earlier today I knew that the sort of man you deserve would tell you how he felt,” he bent forward from his kneel and rested his cheek just above her knee on her lower thigh, “even if he was never coming back, because it would be the decent thing. I’m not him, but I wish I was because we could be so much happier if that were the case.”

The shudders, minute to anyone but him, let him know how forcefully she was crying now and he hunched even further in on himself. _Someone should take her away from me_. He bit the inside of his cheek, then, when his mind summoned up a reply, _someone almost did._

“No we wouldn’t be, Sherlock, because Tom was that man. And I wasn’t happy with him, not as happy as I thought I would be. You infuriate me, Sherlock, but you also make me happy. What would make me happiest right now is if you told me—and meant it—that you came here to say you love me. That you’re going to be brilliant and figure out this business with Jim’s picture everywhere on every telly. Can you do that?”

Her fingers stroked through his hair as he hesitated— _if I missed Moriarty’s death how can I outwit him this time?—_ but finally he nodded and sucked in a deep breath as he straightened up, putting both hands on Molly’s knees and looking up at her. Her fingers smoothed out of his hair and stroked down his temple to cup at his cheek. Her brown eyes were as patient as they’d ever been with him.

“I love you—I _love_ you, and I will do everything I can with this turn of events.”

He didn’t promise he would never leave her, because he’d left her twice already and that was no track-record to be making promises on. But Molly didn’t need that, she just smiled as she leaned forward to press a gentle kiss at the corner of his mouth, one he twisted to catch full-on at the last second.

“And no more diversions or suppressions,” he murmured against her lips, moving back just a few inches so his eyes could focus properly on hers, “just us.” Molly huffed out a happy chuckle and drew him back.

“Just us.”


End file.
